Anxiety
by Azaria Stromsis
Summary: "You loathe killing people because it reminds you of a past that you would rather forget." - Post 2x11, "Disorder", Kensi introspective.


**Anxiety**

You hate killing people.

You loathe killing people because it reminds you of a past that you would rather forget. Your memory doesn't help at all, repeatedly playing back the final, dying look in their eyes. The final, dying look in Talbot's eyes as he fell with a bullet, your bullet, squarely in his chest because as always you are a perfect shot.

Your name is Kensi Blye. You're the OSP Junior Special Agent at NCIS in Los Angeles. Your father is dead, your mother gone, and your only family is a woman who scares the shit out of you at times, a man who reminds you of the brother you never had, a man who at times you want to strangle and hug with gratefulness, and another man who whenever you look at him your heart breaks for two entirely different reasons.

Your name is Kensi Blye and you are having a panic attack.

You can't help yourself. Every time your memory replays the boardwalk, the shining sun and the laughter and the man drawing his gun on you, or a memory like the boardwalk, screams and guns and foreign tongues yelling at you, you wake up. Your dream is usually a twisted retelling of the events and your body is covered in sweat, shivering in the warm, California air. You force yourself to stare at the star that you purposefully put on your ceiling for this very situation and you force yourself to realize that it wasn't real. It wasn't fucking real and you're alive so you shouldn't be panicking.

The panic attacks remind you so much of Columbia, and Afghanistan, and that other place where you were held. They never did tell you where you were, only kicked you in the head and pushed shoots of bamboo under your fingernails to make you tell secrets that you weren't even sure you knew. You think now, in hindsight, it was somewhere in Asia, probably in the forests deep in Laos or Cambodia. But after they got you out, after a year in Columbia, two months in Afghanistan and five months in that other place, every single time there would be a period of panic. Over whelming panic where you couldn't function because the anxiety made your hands shake so much you couldn't even hold a glass without dropping it. Over whelming panic because you just couldn't sleep. And when you did sleep you couldn't stop the nightmares and, even worse, the night terrors. When you would wake up in the middle of the night with no reason for why you were panicking because you hadn't been dreaming.

After Columbia, you were never really yourself again. No one in your trade is ever really themselves again. Even though you tried over and over again to get yourself back you just were not the same and you were so glad when you dumped everyone who knew you before because they wouldn't recognize you now. You weren't sure you could even recognize yourself. You're still not sure.

And then you found out why you were never the same. The hated letters: PTSD.

You were officially diagnosed with PTSD after Columbia, when you were twenty one. After Columbia, the government conveniently lost your file (because you were too good to be lost to a mental illness, even though sending you back was just putting you and your team mates in more harm; you never stopped it and you consistently put yourself into those situations, convincing yourself that your soul was numb to the situation) and sent you to Venezuela, when you were kidnapped and you team mates killed because they were worthless and didn't have the information. You were sent to that hated compound that would be your home and prison for the next five months. After you were out, after not telling those bastards a thing, and you made sure that their deaths were violent and painful and bloody (the guilt would plague you later) you were then shipped to Afghanistan.

And that's when you met Jack.,

Jack was, quite literally, your knight in shining body armor rescuing you in the third year of the war. After that you found a miracle wrapped up in a woman who wore triple extra small, was under five feet tall, and liked large guns. She offered you a job and you thought about it and almost took it but Jack's hand in yours stopped your voice.

Your father had been dead for seven years and all of his training had just accelerated your push up the ranks. The division you were working for didn't officially exist. Top undercover and assassination. Your father, even before you realized it, always had a plan for you, looking for the love of his life that left him alone with a daughter that he purposefully turned into a son.

You gasp and shudder, as your body draws your mind to the present because your body is flailing as your body fails you. You suddenly realize that you haven't been breathing when you were thinking of the times when you were tortured, an instinctive reaction to try and pass out before the memories triggered panic attacks. You think that you really should stop that, but old habits die hard.

You had long since lost the medications that you're shipped every month, and you've stopped taking them a long time ago. You only had a few panic attacks a year now, and only Hetty knows about the PTSD. Even Nate doesn't know. That condition was in the file of Vivienne Soledad. Sealed forever because you have long since sworn that you would never be Vivienne ever again because she is the past and the bad times and Kensi Blye does not want to think about Vivienne.

The anxiety passes, slowly but surely, just like it always does as your body realizes that it is not in a firefight, or in a torture chamber, or a jungle where you have no idea which way is up let alone a way out. You haven't thrown up after an attack for a long time and tonight is no different. You just calmly sit up and change the cold, sweat-soaked sheets, throwing them in the laundry, trying to suppress the shaking due to dehydration and the fact that you hadn't eaten the night before so you wouldn't throw up. You knew you would have a panic attack after Talbot's death. You just didn't know it would be so bad.

You make your bed. Going to the kitchen you make a cup of tea and glance around at your apartment. It is gorgeous. Like from the magazine. But cold. With nothing of you.

Even after all of these years, you still cannot get rid of the instinctive urge that you're father ingrained into your psyche: always be ready to move. He taught you well. The only reason you are here now, alive, is because of him and you send up a prayer for him, even though you are atheist.

You look at the clock and realize that it is Christmas Day, three o'clock in the morning.

And you hate Talbot for making your confront the unresolved memory of Jack, of the man you left because you didn't deserve him, of the man who you left right before Christmas. Jack was tall and proud and he had a laugh that made you warm inside and his smile lit his face up so wonderfully. You aren't any of those, and because of the things you have done, you don't deserve any of that.

You look in the mirror that is above the mantle of your fireplace and see a woman who abandoned you and yours, the same cheekbones and eyes and you feel hate roll in your gut even as you barely remember her face from your five year old memory. You look in the mirror and see your father's sad eyes as he trained you to be the best, the best at resisting pain, of becoming someone else, of seeing things that no one else did. You look in the mirror and see the woman who walked out of a marriage that probably would have saved her, walked out while the man she loved slept in their bed.

You had seen the symptoms that the doctor was talking about, seen them and felt them as you realize that the man, Talbot, is like you. PTSD. So you go in there impulsively, not even realizing that everyone is watching you. You just couldn't help yourself because he was like you and dear god above someone who understood. So when you get there and you realize that you have to back up the statement, "I know what you're going through," you decided to tell the truth.

Or, at least the truth as people like them saw it.

It pains you to realize that you cannot take anything said by your team at face value. You've long since realized it and you try not to remember the fact. Even as you had been trading stories earlier that day, you knew that only Sam and Callen would probably be telling the truth. Or, the opposite.

You were the only one lying.

Both thoughts cause you pain, yet you try and block it out for the job and the simple fact that your sanity might not live through it.

So, for your story, you kept everything the same. Except you changed a he for a she and she for a he and Columbia for Afghanistan. That mission was still classified after all and your identity not that secure. You kept everything else the same.

He helped you, he consoled you as you saw the faces of the men you were hired to kill, the children they killed because you were too late, the fellow prisoners watching you with despairing glances as you were dragged into the prison by your hair, refusing to give up the names of who hired you and what country you were working for. He never knew exactly what you were reliving but he knew that you had panic attacks nightly and screamed yourself hoarse at least once a week.

You couldn't help yourself when the tears began to fall in front of your team because those tears were the most truth you had spoken all day.

You still remember getting out of bed and watching his sleeping face as you took one last bottle of pills, your pack, and your car keys and got the hell out. And that's when you became Kensi Blye again. You had been Vivienne Soledad since you had entered the military at eighteen and now you were your father's daughter yet again. It was a week after you left Jack that you showed up on Hetty's doorstep, shocking the poor woman when you actually found her. You were soaked to the skin, crying and shivering. You had asked if the job opening was still available and she had simply put down her gun and hugged you.

You have only ever felt more loved once in your life. Even Jack couldn't look you in the eyes when you were lost in the past, the PTSD making you relive everything. But Hetty had been through it and she simply held you and gave you a warm place to sleep. But the thing she offered that affected you the most were the kind eyes and open ears, even though you never talked about it.

Coming out of the room you couldn't speak. Only Callen would look you in the eye and when he did he nodded. His eyes said that he knew that while you weren't telling the whole and truthful truth you were telling the truth as you saw it and that's all he needed. You coudl only quietly thank him in the back of your mind.

You had brought out his photo that night. Your engagement photograph, with your hand and his ring prominent in the photo. His smile made your heart break again. You didn't even need your well-loved photo to remember his face because your photographic memory has long since engraved his beloved face into your mind forever.

Talbot, even without the PTSD, is more like you than you feel comfortable with.

You hate Talbot because he is alright in the head, or he has the opportunity to be, and he used you. You told Callen you should have figured it out and you should have because that's what you would have done had you still been Vivienne Soledad. You had realized as soon as you were hit upside the head with a frying pan that you were slipping and you were slowly becoming less than a perfect assassin, that there were others in the world better than you. And that made you angry because you had been denying the simple fact that you were getting soft for years.

But you were finally making your peace with that fact because you were tired and almost thirty years old and your job now wasn't to kill people every day.

You left the ring with Jack in New York. You had found that you missed the warmth, after growing up with California. You think it's in your blood.

You drink your tea and sigh as you realize that you too are sweat-soaked and that you need to change your clothes. Maybe you'll be able to throw your clothes in with the load of your sheets.

Suddenly you bow your head and weep because as you look down you realize that the mug you are holding is the very mug that your father drank his coffee out of every morning. You collapse on your kitchen floor as the flood gates are opened and your photographic memory pushes everything to the front: the engagement party, the last image of your mother, Columbia and Afghanistan and Asia whirling together, languages and NCIS training.

You had killed a man today. Your thirty-second. A Marine who was so much like you and so unlike you. You were alone on Christmas because your mother, half Brazilian and half Lebanese, fluent in Portuguese, Arabic, and Spanish, was probably on the other side of the world, ashamed of you, and your father was dead because of a drunk driving accident, the fall of the great Henry Blye, former Marine. You were alone. You had been your whole life, pushed farther and farther away by a father who wanted the best for you even though it really wasn't the best.

You had a panic attack that shook you to your very core even though you wouldn't admit it. You hadn't had a panic attack for a very long time and not one this serious since you had joined NCIS. Sure, you had killed men since you had joined, but they hadn't affected you, not like Talbot had.

You sit on your cold kitchen floor on Christmas Day, bawling like a baby, because, hours after you've technically done the deed, you finally comprehend the simple fact that, to your horror, you've killed a man today.

* * *

_After thinking of the two sentences, "You hate killing people", and "You cannot take anything said in your office at face value", here comes this little piece. For some reason it sounded better in 2nd POV than anything else. A possible look on Kensi's past, because knowing her, anything she says can be twisted and turned.  
_

_Disclaimer: I do not own NCIS: Los Angeles in any way shape or form. All characters belong to Shane Brennan. I am not making any money off of this fanfiction.  
_


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